Hart InterCivic is an Austin-based voting machine company that serves local governments all over the country. Its clients include Hamilton County, Ohio, which administers elections in Cincinnati. Hart InterCivic also has in its DNA just enough traces of Bain and Co. and Romney campaign donors to trigger serious angst in the liberal blogosphere about the fate of Ohio’s must-have 18 electoral votes.

Versions of the story have appeared in The Free Press, an Ohio Web site, in addition to Salon and in a liberal blog carried by Forbes. In a nutshell: three of Hart’s five corporate board members are executives of HIG Capital, a global private equity firm that made what it called a “significant” investment in Hart last year. Four HIG executives (Tony Tamer, John Bolduc, Douglas Berman and Brian D. Schwartz) have been identified as Romney bundlers by independent watchdog groups such as the Sunlight Foundation. HIG employees as a whole have donated $338,000 to the Romney campaign this year, according to Open Secrets. Three of them (Tamer, Berman and Bolduc) used to work at Bain. Among the investors in HIG is Solamere, the private equity firm run by Tagg Romney, the candidate’s son.

Let’s go a little further, shall we?

The Romney connections kindle bitter memories of 2004, when Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold, the Ohio-based voting machine manufacturer, wrote a fundraising letter declaring his commitment to helping deliver the state to George W. Bush. When machine malfunctions and shortages caused long lines and exit polling showed Democrat John Kerry ahead, there were allegations of a stolen election. But Bush won the state by more than 100,000 votes, and the evidence never held up under close scrutiny.

I have a lot of thoughts on this and wonder how widespread issues like this are. I’ve always said, and most likely will say it again, if I can get a receipt at McDonalds, why can’t I get one for an accurate confirmation of my vote.

It’s issues like this that hurt the credibility of the voting process for a lot of Americans. It’s just something to think about and not give a blind eye to.

Discussion (2 Comments)

Is a receipt going to really do you any good? It can say whatever the software wants it to say, and it seems unlikely that any election commission is going to ask you to bring them back in to compare with the electronic record later.

I guess you could do is a random sampling which may catch any weirdness going on.